IT Disaster Recovery Manager

Who are we? Howden is a global insurance group with employee ownership at its heart. Together, we have pushed the boundaries of insurance. We are united by a shared passion and no-limits mindset, and our strength lies in our ability to collaborate as a powerful international team comprised of 24,000 employees spanning over 56 countries. People join Howden for many different reasons, but they stay for the same one: our culture.

It's what sets us apart, and the reason our employees have been turning down headhunters for years. Whatever your priorities - work / life balance, career progression, sustainability, volunteering - you'll find like-minded people driving change at Howden.

Role Overview The IT DR Manager is accountable for defining, implementing, testing and maintaining the organisation's IT Disaster Recovery (DR) across a regulated, global insurance environment. The role ensures that critical infrastructure, platforms, and applications are recoverable in line with agreed recovery objectives, regulatory expectations, and operational resilience requirements. Working closely with infrastructure service managers, security, technology risk, compliance, and third-party vendors, the IT DR Manager provides governance, oversight, and assurance that DR strategies, plans, testing, and documentation remain effective, current, and auditable.

The role is heavily vendor-dependent, with responsibility for ensuring outsourced providers deliver DR services in line with contractual and regulatory obligations. Finally, Howden has developed new Technology resilience frameworks, DR methods, technical recovery standards and implemented a recovery tool. The successful candidate will work closely with technology risk, on-net entities, infrastructure and applications to ope rationalise them.

• DR Strategy & Framework Ensure that Howden Group Services (HGS) ITDR capability comply with the recovery elements of the Group Technology Operational and Resilience Frameworks. Input into Framework updates and improvements. Define end to end recovery objectives for infrastructure and technology services based that support business facing services RTO’s and RPO’s. Ensure that business facing services owners (entity, Group infrastructure and applications) are aware of their responsibilities and follow the recovery elements of Group Technology Resilience framework and supporting guidance.
• DR Service Management & Vendor Oversight Provide governance and oversight of outsourced vendors delivering DR capabilities, including backup, recovery, replication, and failover services. Ensure third party DR solutions are designed, configured, and maintained to meet agreed resilience targets. Review vendor deliverables including DR plans, technical designs, test results, and remediation actions. Monitor service performance, risks, and compliance against SLAs, KPIs, and contractual requirements.
• Recovery capability development and maintenance Ensure that new services that require DR recovery solutions can meet their end to end RTO and RPO. Support M&A activities to ensure migrated applications have the correct level of DR capability and are on-boarded effectively into the wider group recovery end to end technical recovery capability. Working with divisions/entities, HGS applications and entities develop the end to end recovery sequences for On-net hosted services.
  
  Ensure that these sequences are maintained effectively in the Howden ITDR tool. Ensure supporting recovery documentation (e.g. technical work instructions) is maintained effectively for infrastructure and technology services and loaded into the recovery tool. Coordinate and track the update of entity and HGS applications DR documentation and their upload into the recovery tools. Ensure that DR technical end to end recovery capabilities are maintained as the production environments change.
  
  Maintain inventories of recoverable systems, dependencies, recovery tiers, and criticality classifications. This will involve ensure that these are effectively flagged within the CMDB.
• DR Testing & Assurance Plan, coordinate, and oversee regular DR testing exercises, including…